Resilience

Resilience has become a cool buzzword in popular psychology lately, thanks to Angela Duckworth's book, "Grit."  I have not read it, but I've heard Duckworth interviewed several times.  I imagine it is a good book.

I've been thinking about resilience lately as I see people around me dealt horrible hands.  A colleague who has a daughter with a genetic, terminal disease loses her husband to cancer. A friend loses the love of her life to a freak medical anomaly. Another former colleague loses her husband to a long illness and now her son-in-law to an unexpected health crisis, and she has a disabled adult daughter.

What amazes me is that most of us carry on after these tragedies.  We are grief stricken, sad, miserable, angry, and all those things.  But we keep putting one foot in front of the other, we muddle through.  Sure, we make mistakes, we forget things, we lash out, we lie in bed and cry, but, for the most part, we survive. It seems pretty incredible that as humans we have the capacity to have such deep feelings of sadness and still survive.  Of course, some people become bitter or withdrawn, some find they can't cope with the pain and dull it with substances or end the pain with their own death.  But, most carry on.

Even those of us spared the most horrific of tragedies have found ourselves in situations of great sadness, or times when we have had to do things we never imagined ourselves being able to do. Somehow we do them, we find some great reserve of strength and expend it. At times we are called upon to find even deeper reserves, and they, surprisingly are there.  Today I find it incredible, the things I've done that I never thought I could do, but I am even more amazed by those around me who have gone so much further and have further yet to go.